The miniaturization of electronic components has seen mobile devices shrink to the point where screen size is a major limiting factor. That could be set to change with Sony announcing it has developed a super-flexible full color OLED display which can be repeatedly wrapped around a thin cylinder while still producing moving images. Could we soon see mobile phones with pencil form factors and roll out displays?

The new display was possible thanks to the development of integration technologies of Organic Thin-Film Transistors (OTFTs) and OLEDs on an ultra-thin 20-micrometer thick flexible substrate. A flexible on-panel gate-driver circuit with OTFTs and soft organic insulators allowed Sony to get rid of the conventional rigid driver integrated circuit (IC) chips that would impede the rolling up of a display.

By combining these technologies, Sony was able to demonstrate the world’s first OLED panel which is capable of producing moving images while being repeatedly rolled-up and unrolled around a cylinder with a radius of 4mm. Even after 1000 cycles of repeatedly rolling-up and stretching the display there was no clear degradation in the display’s ability to reproduce moving images.